


cleopas

by Askance



Series: Mashiach [11]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Mention of Character Death, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-22
Updated: 2013-04-22
Packaged: 2017-12-09 04:02:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/769751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean doesn’t speak anymore. Like all the changes that have come about since Sam breathed his bloody last in that tiny cold Kansas motel room, it’s something Castiel has come to accept about the new world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cleopas

Dean doesn’t speak anymore.

Like all the changes that have come about since Sam breathed his bloody last in that tiny cold Kansas motel room, it’s something Castiel has come to accept about the new world. It’s been almost six months, and Dean hasn’t said a word to him or to anyone in all that time, and Cas—regretfully—is beginning to forget what his voice sounded like.

Life is different now, as life must be in the wake of a death like that, but slowly Cas thinks he is beginning to grow accustomed to it. The things that make up their routine now are sad and small and absolute. Dean has shown no desire to take up hunting again; instead they wander from place to place, always together, never conversing. Cas has become so used to the silence that Dean wears like a coat that he himself has reduced his vocabulary to only the barest necessities: enough words to book the night’s double motel room, to order takeout, to greet a friendly face on the street. This is all he needs.

For a while he tried, sometimes, to prod Dean into dialogue, if only to ascertain whether or not Dean himself even existed anymore behind the sad blankness of his eyes; but his efforts were fruitless, and he gave up.

They drive wherever the whim of Dean’s hands on the Impala’s wheel takes them. Sometimes they sleep. The most sound that ever occupies the space between them is the hum of the car’s engine and the buzz of a hotel air conditioner.

Castiel knows—a bland little fact—that if, mid-ecstasy, Sam hadn’t reached up and touched Dean’s face with his freely bleeding hand and begged him (with wide eyes that didn’t see much of anything at all, and a frantic mouth) to promise to keep living when he was gone, and if Dean hadn’t sworn on his own grave that he would, that Dean probably wouldn’t have lasted past that first week without Sam in the world. He’d have put a bullet in his brain as soon as Sam’s incorruptible body was safely placed away, and it would have been up to Cas to bury him, and up to Cas to keep existing in the emptiness of everything. He knows this in the same way that he knows the sun will rise tomorrow, and it still surprises him when each set twenty-four hours comes and goes and Dean is still alive of his own volition. And of course, he could ask—ask how Dean still finds the strength in his bones to get up in the morning—but he would get no answer, and this is something else he knows.

So Dean has kept his promise, but the more Cas trails after him—keeping his own promise to their late and loved Messiah to take care of him—the more he thinks that the promise is being kept, but only just. Dean isn’t living; he’s surviving. He eats when Cas brings him food, sleeps when night falls, puts on clothes and shaves in motel mirrors and drives with both hands on the wheel, but he doesn’t speak anymore; he doesn’t pass through the world. Instead it seems the universe has orchestrated itself around him, and moves past him as he stands still, and though he sometimes takes left-hand turns into it, eventually he comes to a stop outside it again. He stares but rarely seems to see. Sometimes he goes for walks far into the night and doesn’t return to their room until early morning, and when he closes the door he lies down in all his clothes and stares at the ceiling until the sun rises, and Cas is never sure where he goes when he leaves like that, and is never sure whether or not he’ll come back.

So have six months gone by since Sam quietly passed away, and the last thing Castiel heard Dean say was to his little brother’s corpse. He’d whispered, “I love you so much, Sammy,” bending over the body to kiss Sam’s bloody forehead, and he’d stayed like that—bowed, eyes closed—for a very long time. And after that they had driven the body to Idaho, laid Sam to rest in that tiny nameless church, as close to Arimathea as they could get in the middle of America; and from that point on Dean’s lips have been sealed. Cas hasn’t seen him smile or cry since they left that place behind and he almost wishes that Dean would crack a little, show something on his face other than the blank numbness of grief. He’d promised Sam he’d take care of Dean, and he isn’t sure what more there is to do—he would do anything, if only Dean would ask, if only Dean would tell him how to smoothe that grief out of his face. Cas thinks he would be happy even to hear Dean scream at him, or send him away, because at least that would mean that he was waking up. At least that would mean he had some fire left in his body.

* * *

 

But Dean weathers those six months without cracking, and Cas is distinctly at a loss for how to help him, and Dean still doesn’t crack when, into the seventh Sam-less month, the stirring starts.

They stumble upon the chapel quite by accident. Dean takes a wrong turn off the county road, thinking it to be an exit for the next town, and comes to a slow halt at the end of the gravel drive, where the shack sits squat and bent. It’s old brown siding, like the broken-down stables and houses glimpsed from far highways in the rural south, and the wood is damp with early morning rain, but someone has replaced the empty maws of the windows with coloured glass and fixed a rudimentary cross to the peak of its sagging roof.

Cas expects Dean to turn the Impala around immediately, but he watches his eyes skip over the coloured glass and then the engine cuts, and Dean is getting out of the car. Cas follows. The echoes of their doors slamming ring through the empty trees like gunshots.

Their boots crunch in the wet gravel, and Cas watches every shift of Dean’s body for clues to his thoughts, knowing that no matter what he thinks of this place he won’t say anything. It’s just a chapel, by all appearances, and even after everything Dean isn’t much for holy places, but he walks up to the buckled front door with a kind of stiffness in his body, a tension that Cas thinks feels familiar. When Dean’s hand meets the splintered wood Cas remembers where he’s seen it before: it’s the same spring-loaded anxiety that took hold of Dean’s shoulders whenever he knelt at Sam’s bedside to unravel the bandages from his feet, the same bated breath that seemed to hope that the wounds would have gone away by themselves like rubies stolen in the night, and that would always be exhaled in disappointment.

“Dean,” he says, shocking the quiet with his own rarely-used voice, and Dean pushes the buckled door open enough to step inside. Unable to do anything else, Cas follows.

It’s dark inside the tiny chapel, and thin spears of faded sunlight paint stripes of white across a mass of unmatched chairs crowded into the space. Some are plastic, some upholstered, but all old and covered in dust save for a few smudged hand-prints here and there, or the disturbed patterns of bodies sitting and rising. The chairs all face a low table—an altar—covered with a waterstained cotton cloth at the back end of the shack, and it’s when he glimpses this that Dean stops short and Cas sees his throat begin to work.

Clumsily, someone has embroidered the letters _S.W._ into the hanging front of the altarcloth in red thread.

“Dean,” Cas says again.

Dean ignores him and moves, dreamlike, down the haphazard aisle between the chairs, and bypasses the altarcloth. His hands are trembling. Cas stands near the door and watches with a hollow hungry feeling in his gut.

An old wooden music stand, of the sort found in ancient one-room schoolbuildings, perhaps, is tucked into the back corner behind the altar, and a row of squat unlit candles in red-glass votives line a construction beam above it. Dean goes to it and stands, looking down at whatever is enshrined there, for a long time.

In silence, Cas stands, and Dean stands, for perhaps ten minutes in all; and then Dean turns away from the music-stand shrine and walks past the altar and the chairs and Castiel and back out into the dim dawn.

Cas retraces his footsteps in the dust. Something—a piece of paper, it seems—is placed on the music stand. It’s hard to see in the darkness. Cas passes his hands over the unlit candles and they quietly come to life, and he lifts the piece of paper into their light.

It’s a photograph of Sam, grainy and grey as if taken with a jittery camera: his body laid out on that crypt slab in Idaho. Someone has clumsily scribbled with red pen at the dark spot on his visible hand, and the pricks picked out on his brow, as if to say, _do you see these_?

Cas replaces the photograph and looks around the chapel, feeling extraordinarily and suddenly surrounded. When he leaves, and gets back into the passenger seat of the already-thrumming Impala, he doesn’t say Dean’s name. He doesn’t have to. Dean drives them away from that place and further still, the whole day past nightfall, until they’ve crossed a state border and deposited themselves in a one-stoplight town with a vacant motel.

“Double room, please,” Cas says at the counter, the minimum of speech. As soon as they are inside, Dean drops his duffel on the bed and walks out, and is gone into the dark until three in the morning.

* * *

 

It isn’t the only chapel they find, and soon there are believers, too. Soft-eyed strangers who crane their necks at Dean as he walks under the motel portico, who reach out hesitantly to touch Castiel’s sleeve as if by touching they can be healed of something. None of them ever intrude too deeply, but the more they’re recognised the longer Dean’s nighttime walks become, as if the farther he goes into the dusk the farther he can leave every faithful face behind.

Someone—someone who still speaks—must have told someone else about the body in that Idaho crypt that just isn’t decaying, the beautiful young man with wounds like Christ that bleed. Mouths must have opened, Cas thinks, and tongues moved, and word spread. They haven’t been back to that church since they left Sam there; Cas thinks it’s because Dean won’t be able to bear it—if he steps back into that cold stone, he’ll never leave again. But there is a chapel in West Virginia, and there are believers in Maine, and on a tabloid in a convenience store in Washington Cas sees a headline asking rhetorically for answers about the thing people are calling the American Messiah. The cheap ink gets on his fingers when he opens it in the register line. _Who is this miraculous incorruptible body?_ it asks. _Who does it belong to? And what does it mean? Has the Second Coming come and gone in the form of this beautiful young man?_

Castiel wishes, briefly, as he replaces the magazine in its rack, that they still did things the old way, and that stones could stand between the curious public and their Messiah. To think that so many eyes are resting on Sam’s body in that crypt makes him feel as if something is being let loose and that it is, in some way, unfair.

* * *

 

Nine months after Sam dies, Dean takes them into the heart of the rural South, and they remain there, bouncing between towns in silence, for several weeks. Frost lies on the grass of the fields and the sky is always grey, and sometimes they pass billboards in the long empty tracts of highway between places with messages like

SAINT SURVIVOR WATCHES OVER US

and

HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD NEWS OF THE AMERICAN MESSIAH?

and Dean passes all of these by with calmness, neither speeding up nor slowing down, but fixing his eyes on the cold horizon. His grief has settled into the lines of his face so deeply that Cas thinks nothing will ever wrench it out again.

With a kind of weariness, they settle into a motel situated near a set of railroad tracks, and Cas can almost feel the cold draping down around them. “Double room, please,” he says, and they stay there for a surprising five days. Dean sleeps or sits by the window, staring out at the tiny flakes of urgent snow that drift out of the sky, watching the nearby light of the train crossing switching on and off. Whenever a train passes by, the whole room rattles. Dean goes out walking every evening, jacketless despite the descending winter.

On the sixth night, Cas goes with him, more out of concern than anything else. He knows that Dean won’t kill himself, but it doesn’t dissuade him from worrying that Dean might sit down somewhere in the wilderness, in the cold, and simply never rise again, that he’ll curl up around the little Sam-shaped flame of the reason for his living until it flickers out and he dies of hypothermia in the street. Dean doesn’t protest when Cas follows him out of the motel room as blue foggy dusk is falling in, but he doesn’t look at him either.

The twilight is heavy and still, and the cold dark eye of the railroad crossing up ahead is the only thing that punctuates the fog. Dean shoves his hands into his pockets as he walks, and Cas trails at his heels. He wonders if the faithful ever bother Dean on these walks, prod or push him, but somehow he doesn’t think they do. They always maintain a distance as if, somehow, they know that he isn’t to be disturbed, and at any rate there is no one that he can see anywhere tonight—only the greenish slouch of Dean’s shoulders as he walks and the dark, dark blue that folds around them.

They cross the railroad tracks, crunching across the gravel. A few bare trees line the road, vanishing into the mist like so many Roman crucifixes, and the asphalt gives way to a blurred and smudged horizon a little ways up. Cas moves a little closer to Dean, matching his stride, almost afraid that he’ll lose him in the fog.

He expects that they’ll walk a fair while into the dark and, at some point, turn around and go back, and that Dean will be lost to his attention all the while. What he doesn’t expect is the far-off sound of someone else approaching through the dusk.

Dean hears it too, and pauses, lifting his head. His eyes are far away, unfocused, but they slowly come back into place, and Cas lingers by his shoulder. They must be two dark shapes on the side of the road, fuzzy to any passersby.

Slowly a shape forms itself a little ways away, and resolves itself into the silhouette of another walker, coming towards them. Cas isn’t sure why Dean isn’t moving, but there’s something in the way he’s holding himself that tells Castiel that this has happened before—that something about meeting another on these walks freezes his friend.

The silhouette, slowly, gains detail from the dusk, and Cas feels his heart slowly rise into his throat, and a stammer begin in his breast that he has never felt before. The anxious feeling that something sudden and important is happening, or going to happen, because he can see now that the walker is a man—the walker has long hair—the walker has broad shoulders—the walker is very tall.

He sees Dean’s eyes go wide with something that is horribly like hope. Dean takes a step forward and his hands come out of his pockets, lift a little. The walker walks in the inexplicable way that seems to suggest that he is walking to _them_ , the walk of someone who feels recognition.

There is a panic in the air around them where they stand, a kind of frantic wishing, and Cas knows what Dean must be thinking as the traveler gets closer—that those shoulders are familiar—that the gait is almost right—and he himself feels his own grief shoot like an arrow into his mouth and finds himself wishing frantically, too, because the walker from this distance looks like Sam.

With such effort that it seems to break him in two, into the air Dean says, “Sammy?”

Cas feels a jolt at the sound of his voice—he looks at him, realises with a pang of clarity in his heart that he hasn’t heard it in nearly a year, and though they are only two syllables they are laced with such hope, such fear, such longing, such _love_ , that they seem to contain everything that Dean is or will ever be, and they dissipate cruelly fast.

The walker, if he has heard, doesn’t respond, but keeps approaching—

—and Castiel’s heart falls slowly, beating, back out of his throat, and he sees Dean’s face grow slack and wide and two pinpricks of evening light slip out of his eyes and down his cheeks, because it isn’t Sam. The shoulders are not broad enough, the hair not long enough, the face not sweet enough, and neither of them truly see what the man looks like as he passes them by with a glance and a frown. His Sam-less face dissolves as quickly as salt in water and Cas turns his head to watch the stranger pass, continue, vanish over the railroad tracks and into the fog.

Dean is stock-still, staring into the point of the world that exists directly before his eyes, and when Cas turns to look at him again, his eyelids are flickering dully, absently. He swallows hard, and slowly his mouth begins to tremble, as if the exhaustion of the only word he has left has rendered him weak, and Cas watches as tears begin to spill hot and fast from his eyes.

As if in defiance of his stupid ill-begotten hope Dean spits the name— _Sammy!_ —angry, loud, hoarse, and his face crumples like the face of a little child.

He sinks, as if his knees no longer work, into the dewy roadside grass, and Cas sinks with him. He starts back as Dean lets out a sound of frustration and anger and grief that echoes against the asphalt and the tracks and the retreating silhouette of the walker, and then Dean dissolves into wracking painful mourning, covering his head with his arms.

“ _Sammy,_ ” he sobs again, and it’s the last time; he makes no more sound; he kneels on the ground as if in deepest worship and, unable to do anything else, Cas gently kneels over him, covers his trembling shoulders with his arms, presses his face into the crook of Dean’s neck, holding him as if to keep him from falling, endlessly, into the Earth.

**Author's Note:**

> This series belongs in part to Casey, whose contributions can be read [here](http://whiskyandoldspice.tumblr.com/fanfiction). 
> 
> Cleopas was one of the two disciples who met the risen Jesus on the Road to Emmaus.


End file.
